Botanic Gardens Trust, Sydney, Australia

 

The need for PlantBank

The NSW Seedbank in south-western Sydney is currently the main facility for seed conservation and research in NSW and is a key component in NSW’s conservation planning. However, the Seedbank is now at crisis point. The facilities are out-dated, unsafe and unable to protect a State asset worth $18M today and increasing significantly in value each year.

Hundreds of plants in NSW are already at risk of extinction, and climate change threatens to make this situation worse. The Seedbank is the ultimate insurance policy against extinction and already holds collections representing a third of the State’s flora including a third of the State’s threatened flora. We need to continue to store seed for as many species and populations as possible, make sure that seed remains viable, and find new ways to bank seeds that are short-lived in standard storage conditions. The current seedbank and associated research facilities are inadequate for this task.

It is imperative that the NSW Seedbank be upgraded to 21st century standards so that NSW can respond to the threats of climate change and environmental degradation.

PlantBank is the Trust’s response to these imperatives. Specifically, PlantBank has been designed to deal with the following critical deficiencies in the existing Seedbank and research facilities at the Australian Botanic Garden, Mount Annan:

  1. The Seedbank is at capacity, preventing further protection of the State’s floral biodiversity. The banking of both threatened and common species is an internationally recognised key risk management strategy for dealing with the onset and consequences of climate change.
  2. Storage facilities for threatened species that do not produce seed (such as tissue culture and glasshouse facilities) are sub-standard and aging.
  3. The Seedbank, associated conservation collections and research facilities have no backup facilities, no fire protection mechanisms, no capacity to exclude rodents, limited security and no building management system, thereby jeopardising a public asset estimated to be worth $18M. In order to maintain the current facilities the maintenance budget is expected to increase dramatically over the next 5 years.
  4. The research facilities are at the point of technical obsolescence, creating bottlenecks and inefficiencies and seriously limiting the Trust’s capacity to find innovative solutions to the impacts of environmental change on the NSW flora.
  5. Temporary and inadequate solutions to critical space limitations have included turning storage rooms into office space, and a cleaner’s store into a research growth room but no further opportunities for conversion exist. These limitations restrict the type of research activities undertaken and endanger future collaborative research and funding revenue to in the order of $300,000 to $400,000 p.a.
  6. Equipment failure in the research and seedbank infrastructure has rapidly increased over the last 3 years. Contamination of plant cultures and freezing damage, as a result of this equipment failure, continues to destroy research experiments and seedbank collections.
  7. High quality research, teaching and learning outcomes cannot be provided from the existing facilities, limiting the ability of the Trust to attract quality students, collaborations and ultimately grant funding. Education of the general community requires facilities that minimise staff interaction and maximise their ability to convey information in a low cost, effective and exciting forum that provides a visitor experience without compromising core activities and staff safety.

The PlantBank initiative is part of an integrated program to enable the Royal Botanic Gardens & Domain Trust to fulfil its role and undertake crucially important work that will provide an insurance policy against the loss of plants in the wild and ensure new food supplies and medicines are available in the future.

The Trust’s research and collection programs are world class - integrating plant biology and conservation, the identification of genetic variation, collection of seed and taxonomic material, circumscription of genetic entities, their protection in the seedbank, germination and rehabilitation in the environment. Failure to implement PlantBank would be a lost opportunity to maintain and build on these programs.

Workshop
Seed and fruit morphology workshop

Pittosporum angustifolium
Fruit of Pittosporum angustifolium

Solanum cinereum germinating
Seed of Solanum cinereum germinating

 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 

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